Related papers: Flexoelectricity and pattern formation in nematic …
We present a unified formulation of a rotationally invariant nonlinear elasticity for a variety of spontaneously anisotropic phases, and use it to study thermal fluctuations in nematic elastomers and spontaneously anisotropic gels. We find…
Understanding and controlling the director field configuration, shape, and orientation in nematic and cholesteric liquid crystals is of fundamental importance in several branches of science. Liquid crystalline droplets, also known as…
Flexoelectric effect is the coupling between strain, polarization and their gradients, which are prominent at the nanoscale. Although this effect is important to understand nanostructures, such as domain walls in ferroelectrics, its…
We demonstrate that the changes in the elastic properties of the FeAs systems, as seen in our resonant ultrasound spectroscopy data, can be naturally understood in terms of fluctuations of emerging nematic degrees of freedom. Both the…
Within the Landau-Ginsburg-Devonshire phenomenological approach we study the ferroic nanosystems properties changes caused by the flexo-effect (flexoelectric, flexomagnetic, flexoelastic) existing spontaneously due to the inhomogeneity of…
We develop a Landau theory for bend flexoelectricity in liquid crystals of bent-core molecules. In the nematic phase of the model, the bend flexoelectric coefficient increases as we reduce the temperature toward the nematic to polar phase…
In culture migrating and interacting amoeboid cells can form nematic liquid crystal phases. A polar nematic liquid crystal is formed if the interaction has a polar symmetry. One type of white blood cells (granulocytes) form clusters where…
We analyze the phase behavior of lyotropic nematic liquid crystals in the self-organizing flow, viz. so called active nematics (AN). Their elastic properties are mutually caused by evolution of topological defects (for instance,…
Understanding the organizing principles of interacting electrons and the emergence of novel electronic phases is a central endeavor of condensed matter physics. Electronic nematicity, in which the discrete rotational symmetry in the…
Strong interplay of spin and charge/orbital degrees of freedom is the fundamental characteristic of the iron-based superconductors (FeSCs), which leads to the emergence of a nematic state as a rule in the vicinity of the antiferromagnetic…
A great deal of effort has been recently devoted to the study of dielectric relaxation processes in ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals, yet their interpretation remains unclear. In this work, we present the results of broadband…
We analyze a model of mutually-propelled filaments suspended in a two-dimensional solvent. The system undergoes a mean-field isotropic-nematic transition for large enough filament concentrations and the nematic order parameter is allowed to…
We propose a lattice statistical model to investigate the phase diagrams and the soft responses of nematic liquid-crystal elastomers. Using suitably scaled infinite-range interactions, we obtain exact self-consistent equations for the…
Flexoelectricity phenomenon is the response of electric polarization to an applied strain gradient and is developed as a consequence of crystal symmetry in all materials. In this study, we show that the presence of strain gradient in…
Liquid crystal droplets are of great interest from physics and applications. Rigorous mathematical analysis is challenging as the problem involves harmonic maps (and in general the Oseen-Frank model), free interfaces and topological defects…
A promising approach in designing composite materials with unusual physical behavior combines solid nanostructures and orientationally ordered soft matter at the mesoscale. Such composites not only inherit properties of their constituents…
The linear stability of a lipid membrane under a DC electric field, applied perpendicularly to the interface, is investigated in the electrokinetic framework, taking into account the dynamics of the Debye layers formed near the membrane.…
Continuum models of active nematic gels have proved successful to describe a number of biological systems consisting of a population of rodlike motile subunits in a fluid environment. However, in order to get a thorough understanding of the…
Theoretical study of dynamical phenomena induced by a linearly polarized plane wave incident perpendicularly on a planar aligned nematic layer with the light intensity as the control parameter is reported. We find the threshold of the…
Recent experiments have exploited elastic instabilities in membranes to create complex patterns. However, the rational design of such structures poses many challenges, as they are products of nonlinear elastic behavior. We pose a simple…